


I Know The World's A Broken Bone

by SharkEnthusiast



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Parrish is Bad at Feelings, Blue Sargent Needs A Hug, College Student Adam Parrish, Dead Richard Gansey III, Gen, Heavy Angst, M/M, Minor Richard Gansey III/Adam Parrish, Minor Richard Gansey III/Ronan Lynch, Post-Richard Gansey III's Death, Richard Gansey III is a Good Friend, Ronan Lynch & Blue Sargent Friendship, Ronan Lynch Angst, Ronan Lynch Needs a Hug, Ronan Lynch is Bad at Feelings, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish Breakup, adam parrish needs a hug, all of them - Freeform, attempted sacrifices to bring people back from the dead!, sorta i guess idk, they're trying their best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:21:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28103106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharkEnthusiast/pseuds/SharkEnthusiast
Summary: Richard Campbell Gansey dies in the spring. Blue Sargent, Ronan Lynch, Henry Cheng, and Adam Parrish scatter his ashes on the ley line 3 weeks later.He does not come back, ghost or otherwise.The world keeps spinning.
Relationships: Adam Parrish & Blue Sargent, Henry Cheng & Noah Czerny & Richard Gansey III & Ronan Lynch & Adam Parrish & Blue Sargent, Richard Gansey III & Adam Parrish, Richard Gansey III & Blue Sargent, Richard Gansey III & Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Ronan Lynch & Adam Parrish & Blue Sargent, Ronan Lynch & Blue Sargent, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 2
Kudos: 29





	1. One.

**Author's Note:**

> uhhhhhhh. I'm back, I guess.  
> Warning. For grief.

I.

Richard Campbell Gansey dies in the spring. Blue Sargent, Ronan Lynch, Henry Cheng, and Adam Parrish scatter his ashes on the ley line 3 weeks later. 

He does not come back, ghost or otherwise. 

The world keeps spinning. 

II.

Adam never has good dreams anymore. Especially not in his dorm, where the shadows feel long and the road outside thrums. Not when Gansey died, shoulders soaked with water, smelling of mint, blue lilies in his hair. He dreams of blood instead, of his hands, his eyes. Of Ronan’s pale neck beneath them, of Cabeswater, of his essay due in intro to astrophysics. 

So Adam doesn’t sleep, doesn’t dream. He studies and works, ignores the eye bags and aches. 

The funny thing is how much he misses it. The valley, the mountains. The kudzu and its bugs, poison ivy and magic. Funny, how on his bad days he misses Henrietta, and how on his worse ones he missed the double-wide, too. Adam knows pain, knows stitches done with dental floss, of bruises, broken bones. He should be well versed in this. 

Funny, how he misses Ronan, yet he’s the one who won’t pick up the phone. How Adam had yelled that he didn’t want to be attached to someone so obsessed with playing with death, didn’t want to be chained to a falling star. 

He is getting awfully good at examining the cracks in the ceiling of his dorm, awfully good at pretending. 

Adam Parrish and his pride. He wonders if he even knows the difference between it and self-destruction. If he even knows the difference between being awake and asleep. 

Adam does not know what Gansey’s last words to him were, anyway. If they were something pitiful and sorry, if they had been tainted by disdain. He wonders if they had many meaning at all, wonders if not remembering the majority of that day means that there is something fundamentally wrong with him. 

What a broken, damaged thing he is. He wonders if Ronan felt chained to a falling star, too. 

Gansey, honeyed, the sick sound his body had made when it hit the ground. His bees and miniature Henrietta, the flashy orange car, leather notebook. 

He was a king. 

(King, king, king.)

Once Adam, in a suit, hair mussed and voice angry had told Gansey that the world was ending. 

It wasn’t, not yet. 

He sits in his dorm and lets thorns crawl up his throat. He scries. The trees give him nothing, so he looks for something worse. 

He begs. 

_ He is unknowable _ .

“Me for him.” His tongue does not feel like his own. He doesn’t know where Adam Parrish starts or ends. 

“I need him.”

He returns empty handed, and the world keeps spinning, even when it shouldn’t. 

III.

Blue Sargent is standing in front of his 2 o’clock class. Her hair is longer, eyes narrower. She looks older, even though it hasn’t really been long. 

“Blue,” he says, voice a terrible, terrible thing. She loops her arm through his. 

“Adam,” she says back. She seems simultaneously changed and unchanged. It feels that way with most things, recently. She is just as small as she always was. 

“I have class,” he tells her, stopping in front of the lecture hall. 

“Skip.”

“No.”

She smiles then, like it’s cute, like she knows his every crack and crevice. 

_ He is unknowable _ .

Adam hates that look. 

“I’ll wait then.”

Adam is so tired. Bone weary. He can’t sleep, because then he’ll dream and then everything will feel worse. He missed Blue. He wonders if she feels as fragile as she looks, wonders if she drove all this way for him. 

“Don’t,” he says. She smiles again. Pinches his arm gently. 

“I missed you, you loser.” He doesn’t want to say anything. 

“Why’d you come?” His voice is flat. 

(Gansey, a king. Blue had cried over his body with great, heaving sobs. Henry’s hands had been shaking, and Ronan had bit out curse words like they were a prayer or a spell to bring him back. Adam had stood there, and then turned away to call the cops.)

She shrugs, stands to face him. Adam wants her to let go of him, but her face is stern and wrinkled, so he does not protest. 

“My mom said that you tried to do something. She felt it on the ley line.”

He rolls his eyes. 

“Jesus, Blue.”

“You really thought that was a good idea? A deal? Fuck, Adam-”

“What?!” he snaps. His anger wakes something up, and it scares him, how all encompassing and consuming it is. Imaginary vines creep their way up his arms and nestle in between his shoulder blades, grip his neck. He pictures the thorn in the middle of his father's palm. He remembers the trees. He remembers the voices. He remembers, remembers, remembers. 

“What, Blue, like I’m crazy for thinking it? Like I’m stupid for trying? Gansey is  _ dead _ , and I-”

He sighs. Stiffens. He wants to sleep. 

Adam Parrish and his pride. He shrugs her hand off of him, begins to walk up the steps. Blue follows him. 

“Adam,” she says, Henrietta accent and all. Adam’s is gone by now. It’s the only thing he’s ever perfected. She is wearing those useless finger-less gloves. 

“Can we not? Fight?” He used to think she was pretty. Now she just looks like Blue, and sometimes he dreams of her crying over a dead body so loud that the sound of it rings in his deaf ear. “I want you to come to Henrietta with me and spend Christmas in the Barns.”

The barns. Ronan and Henry and Blue, and the 2 empty seats next to them.

Adam sighs. He does not know the answer to this question, how to solve this puzzle. 

“Maybe.”

He leaves, then. His shoes click on the marble of the stairs, and he can feel her watching as he goes. 

He is late to class by less than a minute. 

IV.

Adam drives down to Henrietta for Christmas. He has not slept in 19 hours, and he listens to the murder squash song all the way through 46 times. 

V.

Blue Sargent is not scared of driving recklessly any longer. 

She would like to think that she is no longer sensible. 

Everything has changed. Her mother says the ley line misses its king, and Ronan wakes from nightmares more often than not. Blue does too. They all do. 

She drives to the Barns on Christmas. Henry cannot come due to prior engagements, but Ronan will be there with Opal, and that’s enough for her. 

She is a liar now. 

She misses Gansey, with his full blown smile like a heart attack. 

She misses Noah. 

She misses her raven boys altogether. Half of them are dead now, and Adam might as well be. 

Fuck. 

She sits on Ronan’s couch. She maybe cries a little, and he maybe does too, and then they go out to the cow pastures to break dishware. 

“I’m just fucking  _ angry _ at him!”

“Me too,” Ronan snarls, chucks a teacup at the side of the house. “Asshole. I can’t believe the dipshit just didn’t show up.” 

Blue grunts in a response, throws a plate. The shattering sound it makes doesn’t make her feel good enough, so she hurls another one. 

They are so young. Fuck, Noah, cavity in his skull. 

Gansey. His body had been unmarked. 

She drops herself onto the ground, and snow soaks into the tulle of her mothers old prom dress that she’d attacked with a pear of gardening shears the previous week. Ronan sits beside her, and begins to gnaw at the bracelets on his wrist. Blue lays her head onto his shoulder because he’s always been a fucking space-heater, and she’s cold. 

Her stomach hurts. She has blisters on her palms from digging a grave for another one of Ronan’s monsters, and she picks at them with her nails. Last week when Blue had visited Ronan, there had been blood on his front porch, and when she had opened the door, Ronan had been on the other side of it, face scratched, gaunt, mass of darkness at his feet. The monster the previous week had been wearing Gansey’s face. This one had been wearing Adam’s. 

“Fuck him, anyway.” Ronan mutters, lips fashioned into something cruel and sad. 

It is silent for a long, long time. 

“I hope he’s okay,” Ronan says. It feels alien, foreign coming from Ronan, this anger twisted concern. 

Blue aches. She has for a long time now. 

A lapse, breath, stutter. 

“I miss him.” 

“Me, too, Sargent.” Resigned. 

They are all so fucking tragic it hurts. 

“We should probably visit the grave,” she says, standing. 

“Yeah. We should.” 

They take the BMW to Gansey’s grave, and they both cry on the way there. 


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The hondayota is in the parking lot of the cemetery. They find its owner by Gansey’s grave, wearing a Harvard sweatshirt and the ratty jeans and converse from before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this??? is really sad. I'm sorry.

VI.

The hondayota is in the parking lot of the cemetery. They find its owner by Gansey’s grave, wearing a Harvard sweatshirt and the ratty jeans and converse from before. 

Before. It is funny to think that time has passed at all. 

“Parrish,” Ronan says, puts a hand on his shoulder. Adam barely turns his head to acknowledge him. 

“Fuck,” he says, and brings his hands up to his eyes, movements choppy and shuddering. Like he’s been shoved from dreaming to awake, scrabbling at the edges of something, trying to discern the difference between what's real and what’s not. 

Ronan knows the feeling.

“Fuck,” Sargent says from beside him. Her forehead is all knotted up in concern, fingers worrying at the hem of her ratty sweater. 

Blue had told him last week that sometimes the sadness of it all hits her like a 50 ton wave. Told him that it hits her in the worst places, too, the line at Food Lion, browsing through J&J used books. She told him that she sometimes feels like she’s suffocating, buried alive, and then she gets so angry at herself for not being able to dig herself out.

Ronan knows anger, and he knows resignation. He knows that Blue had loved Gansey so much it had hurt, and the guilt on her shoulders is stifling. 

He is bitter, he is cruel. His smile is the blade of a dull knife, eyes a bullet out of the barrel of a gun. 

He had loved Gansey, too. 

“I’m sorry,” Adam says, and his entire body is shaking. 

There is kudzu choked around the headstone. The sight makes Ronan nearly recoil, green vibrant against the white of the snow. 

It is crawling up Adam’s legs, rooting his legs into the soil. 

“What the fuck,” Blue mutters, noticing the vines. “Adam, is this you?”

“Fuck,” Parrish says again. It is not an answer. Emotion seeps into his voice, and it sounds like panic. His hands are limp at his sides, kudzu is creeping up them. The air smells like earth and dirt and  _ rot, _ and it is suddenly so strong that Ronan has to cover his nose. 

“Adam,” Blue demands, stepping forward. “Adam, is it you making this?”

The vines are growing thicker, wrapping themselves around the grave, tighter, tighter,  _ tighter _ , and something cracks. Stone. 

They are further up Adam’s body, encircling his neck. He is still shaking, and suddenly, what was very quiet before is all of the sudden very loud. 

The plants are whispering, a cacophony of noise, and Blue is desperately prying them off of Adam’s body. She is making a terrible, scared, shaky sound, or maybe that’s been Adam this whole time, or maybe it’s Ronan or Noah or Gansey or  _ Cabeswater, or- _

_ Manus oculosque. Manusoculosque. Manusoculosquemanusoculosquemanus oculosquemanusoculosque.  _

“Make it stop!” Blue says, ripping tendrils from his neck. “Make it safe! Make it safe.” 

It is a desperate thing, a mimicked version of Cabeswaters magicians and their king. And it is so  _ loud _ , the air thrumming with something that makes the hair on Ronan’s arms stand straight up. 

Adam is still, and it somehow makes it all worse, so Ronan throws himself at the vines too. He joins in on Blue’s manic chant, but this time in Latin, and he can’t help but think this is his fault. Some twisted vision from his head, a thought of his manifested onto Adam. 

For the first time in his life, he is sorry. He cannot bear to lose another thing, another person he has given a piece of himself. 

Dead.  _ Dying.  _ The air smells of it, of decay. 

“Adam,” he says. He hates the way it sounds like something more than just his name. 

A prayer. A wish, a want, a cry for help. 

He remembers Adam’s hands around his throat. He remembers being unmade, feeling spread out and condensed at the same time, nightwash seeping out of the corners. He has been trying to forget, but right now he doesn’t want to. 

“Adam.” 

“Make it safe,” Blue says one last time. This time, it listens. 

It is quiet again. 

Adam collapses to the ground, and it is something that looks wrong on him. Like a too-big suit tried on for playing dress up. 

“No.” Ronan does not recognize the thing that coils it’s way out of Adams' lips. “No no no no no.” 

“Are you okay?” Blue asks, squatting onto the ground next to him as he rakes shaky hands through his hair. He looks up then, a horrible, terrible, awful thing. He does not look like himself. He does not look or sound or cry like  _ before. _

“Don’t you get it?” He shouts, and it is desolate. “I was so close. Don’t you get it? I was almost there.”

Ronan gets it. The anger that washes over him nearly knocks him off his feet. Gansey is dead. Time folds around that moment, tapers into a point. Ronan cannot lie and say that he does not think of it too often.

“What?” he spits. He gets it. He does not want to. 

“Me for him,” Adam says. He laughs, like it’s funny. Repeats it again, like a mantra. “Me for him.” 

“No,” Blue says. She hauls Adam up by the arm, even though he is much bigger than she is and she is crying. She buries her face into his chest, standing on her toes to be tall enough to wrap her arms around him. Ronan walks closer. 

“No,” he says. “I can’t lose you, Parrish. Not  _ you.”  _

Adam smells like cheap caffeine and kudzu when Ronan hugs him.

He never lies. 

VII. 

For that Christmas break, the three of them play at some sort of normalcy. 300 Fox Way has them over for a boxing day party, and so the three of them sit in Blue’s bedroom and play a dreamed version of chess that involves three people until Chainsaw eats 2 of Ronan’s pieces. 

That night, in the silence of the motel Adam is staying at, they play at being lovers again. Adam kisses Ronan, and things feel like they used to- the fury of it, the want and hunger. 

Ronan does not shy away from saying Adam’s name like what it is- something holy. Adam doesn’t mind, even if he says Ronan’s name like it’s something he wants to own. He lets him kill all the scars from his father, bite the lobe of his deaf ear, and Ronan in turn lets Adam see the scars on his wrists, too. It feels like a surrender.

It feels like a mirror. 

It feels  _ dangerous _ , this thing that they have created. Ronan holds Adams hands against his bare chest, above the heart, intertwines them with his. He wonders if this is what love is after all, if this is an ending. It feels like one. It feels all too meaningful for what it really is- a seedy motel room and skin. 

They both do not sleep. They wait for the sun to come up before getting dressed, and when Ronan says goodbye to Adam at the door it hurts a little more than it ought too. 

“I missed you,” he says because it is the truth. He had been scared that he was missing a long dead version of Adam, but loving Adam was loving every single part of him and then missing it twice as much. 

“Oh,” Adam says back. “I missed you too.” 

It all feels very heavy suddenly. His head hurts, and when he begins to cry, he tries to convince himself that it is not because of something as stupid as this. 

“I don’t want to lose you forever, Adam.” It is a confession. His heart feels tiny, mouse sized, fluttering in his chest. 

Adam cocks his head to one side. He may be crying, he may be not. 

“I don’t think you will.” He pauses. “Maybe for a little while, but not forever.” He sighs again, shrugs his shoulders. “I do not want to chain you to a falling star.”

“I wouldn’t let you fall.”

“Ronan.” 

“ _ Tamquam _ ,” he breathes. A secret, a dream. 

“ _Alter_ _idem_.” 

VIII.

Ronan drives to the barns in the BMW. He does not see Adam until 3 years later, but it is okay. 

When they do see each other, even after time, it is like looking into a mirror. The lines of Adams' face are as familiar as his own. 

As if a second self. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I suppose I don't know what this ending is- if it's even an ending in the first place. I simultaneously wanted them together and apart, and I couldn't quite decide. I guess this is an in between- a goodbye for now, but a promise for something more. It jumps a little, especially from the tone before. I just wanted to write this- something roundabout and silly in so many ways but also something that made me feel something, too. I just wanted to let you know that I did write this with no editing afterward and having not slept in over 24 hours, so if its completely incoherent please tell me. I hoped you liked it.

**Author's Note:**

> Please tell me what you think! Love you guys, happy to be back!


End file.
